Blood Done Sign My Name

Blood Done Sign My Name

Reflections on Timothy B. Tyson's Memoir Blood Done Sign my Name (2005): The Most Interesting and Memorable Aspects of the Book

Before I read the memoir Blood Done Sign my Name (2005) by Timothy B. Tyson about small town life in North Carolina and a murder of a black man that occurred there in Tyson's childhood; whenever I thought of the non-English "Oxford" it was always Oxford, Mississippi, that beautiful, genteel college town with its well-tended university and proud cultural and literary associations with Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and the like.

But now Tyson's book has starkly and vividly introduced me to a much different, smaller, less well-known Oxford in North Carolina where he grew up. I will think of that one first now; this is the gripping power of Tyson's memoir.

The closest other book I have read that I could possibly compare to Blood Done Sign my Name (2005) is Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird (1960). I read that, also a book about racial tensions in the deep south told through a child's eyes, in grade school and have always vividly remembered nearly every scene of it, despite my not remembering much about any other book I read back then. I think in both cases it is the stark vividness of the extremely descriptive writing, and also the sharp juxtapositions both authors make use of continually, of family love and gentleness, against some of the basest of human cruelties: hatred-based terrorism of a homegrown sort; the terrifying and torture of innocents, murder without justice.

This is also, while a unique story told in a distinctive literary voice, one all too familiar about the American South: a black male's perceived sexuality frightens a white male who then kills him [this is what we are told happens, but we know only the killers' viewpoint]. Also like to Kill a Mockingbird, this story is told in the voice of someone who was a child at the time the described events happened, and who is now looking back.

A key difference between this book and to Kill a Mockingbird, though, is that with the former I could at least escape mercifully into the knowledge, since it is a novel, that this is a made-up (if real enough-seeming) story. With Blood Done Sign my Name (2005) no such available emotional respite exists since the story is true.

The book is based on Tyson's recollections of the murder of a black veteran, 23-year-old Henry Marrow, by a white man and two of his sons when the author was 10 years old. As a child Tyson was friends with ten-year-old Gerald Teel, the youngest son of a store owner. Marrow allegedly entered Gerald's father's store and said something expressing sexual interest in Teel's 19-year-old daughter-in-law, Judy.

I was stunned and bewildered, as if Gerald had informed me that his family had fried up their house cat and eaten it for dinner," recalls Tyson, when Gerald Teel tells him one afternoon: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger" (Blood Done Sign my Name, 2005 1). One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the clear, vivid simplicity of Tyson's writing style, as if the words even now are coming truly through a 10-year-old boy's shocked sensibilities.

Also strikingly memorable are Tyson's descriptions of Oxford's severely outdated, still-rigidly restrictive racial attitudes. For instance, despite landmark Supreme Court decisions (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education) and the American Civil Rights Movement of the time, Tyson describes how time almost stands still in terms of lingering apartness of blacks and whites' being a well-established, unquestioned way of life. The swimming pool in the town was never integrated, for example; it was simply closed instead. The town will not catch up to society, setting the stage for Marrow's violent death and the town's severe under-reaction to it in terms of appropriate justice for the Teels.

Black-white relationships in Oxford, North Carolina as late as 1970, when the Marrow murder occurred, seem to have evolved little since the days of slavery. That alone creates the conditions of possibility for what happens and the town's reaction to it. Still, Tyson also shows vividly how the blacks of the town themselves had evolved in their social attitudes since slavery days, even if the whites of Oxford have lagged behind.

For example, the night of the murder, furious blacks firebomb buildings and stores in retaliation. Tyson's descriptions within the latter scenes remind me of the (much later) aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts. As Tyson states, three hundred or so angry young blacks taking to the streets."..scared the hell out of most of the white people in Oxford, and some of the black ones, too" (Blood Done Sign my Name, 2005, p. 6)." Later, after Gerald Teel's father and brothers are found not guilty of Marrow's murder, other violence black mobs unleash on the town is much worse.